Stray Questions for: Josh Weil

Two things, actually — a story collection and a novel that grew out of it — but they’re so closely linked that I think of them as conjoined twins: they both deal with the way the modern world has worked to decrease the amount of darkness in it, and increase the amount of light, and they’re both about as different from my first book as they could get. The story collection spans time from the American Civil War to the future. The novel is set in a kind of alternative present in a factory town in northern Russia. It’s essentially a love story — almost a fable — about two brothers, once close, now torn apart, and the determination of one of them to bring them together again.

Describe a typical day in your writing life.

When I think of my writing life, I think of life at the cabin in Virginia where I wrote all of the novellas in “The New Valley.” It’s where I do the bulk of my work, and if I’m lucky enough to have a month or two or six to yank loose from the rest of my life, this is how a day there goes by: I wake while it’s still dark, reach for a flashlight (I don’t like to turn the lights on), climb down the ladder from the attic, put a slice of toast in the toaster, put the coffee on, put a kettle of hot water on, too. I watch the burner’s blue flame. I stretch. The toaster pops. Out on the porch, the breeze blows up the valley. I watch the view beginning to take shape in the first blue light of dawn. Then I finish my toast and go inside and put my earplugs in, and pour coffee into the thick, white diner mug my brother gave me long ago. I sit at the small side table I use as a desk. I get to work.

If work goes well, I’ll write for six or seven hours straight.

Maybe I’ll get up to have a second slice of toast, maybe to stoke the wood stove, maybe to pace on the stone path between the apple tree and the grape arbor, maybe just to lie down on the floor beneath my wool blanket and shut my eyes. If it doesn’t go well, I get up a lot more often, and nap a lot longer, and pace a lot faster, and talk to myself more loudly and with more hand gestures while I do it, and probably look increasingly like a half-crazed madman. Either way, by early afternoon I’m tapped out. I make what I call breakfast, deal with real life for a while — anything from splitting wood to sending emails — before the late afternoon when I head up the mountain. I hike fast, and think on whatever I’m writing, and by the time I’ve reached the ridge top I’ve most likely figured it out. Then I run down, strip, shower, sit back at the desk and try to get down a little of what I’d discovered.

Of course, that’s the writing life when the writing life is good.

The tough part comes at times like now: I’ve just moved to an apartment in Baltimore where my upstairs neighbor’s TV wakes me, its babble leaking through the floor; my desk is surrounded by half-unpacked boxes; I spend more time mulling over the class I’m teaching than the book I’m writing; I spend more weekends driving to bookstore readings than reading books.

How one manages to bring together both — a focus on the work without withdrawing entirely from the demands of daily life — is something I’m still struggling to figure out.

What have you been reading or recommending lately?

Over the summer, a few books floored me, and I’d recommend them to everyone: Paul Yoon’s “Once the Shore” is such a full-immersion dreamlike experience that you feel, upon finishing it, like you’ve been dunked into an isolation tank for the past few days. I read Cormac McCarthy’s “The Crossing” back in the spring and it has stuck with me more powerfully than any book I’ve read since. And I nearly always recommend two books — a novel and a collection — that affected me emotionally as much as anything I’ve read in years: Jim Harrison’s “Returning to Earth” and Bret Anthony Johnston’s “Corpus Christi: Stories.” While at the Bread Loaf writers conference this summer, I got glimpses of two books, not out yet, that I can’t wait to read once they are: Maud Casey’s new novel (I don’t know if it’s titled, yet, but watch out once it hits shelves; she read from it and it floored me) and Laura van den Berg’s collection, out next month, “What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us.”

Josh Weil’s The New Valley is one of the best books I’ve read in a while. Jim Harrison, who also had a great book of three novellas, Legends of the Fall, gave his endorsement to The New Valley–I think Weil’s The New Valley is just as strong as Legends of the Fall. It’s that good. Weil is also a phenomenal reader of his work, so if you get a chance to see him read live, I strongly recommend you do so. Needless to say, I look forward to the stories and novel the interview promised are in the works.

I’m a reader for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Josh’s book, The New Valley, was one most memorable works I read last year. It takes a certain amount of courage to attempt to a collection of novellas in this publishing age, but Josh managed to pull it off with an intense and unique voice. He really inhabited these characters’ lives. I look forward to his future fictions, whatever form they take.